Archive for corporate Amercia

Senator Elizabeth Warren is worried about our very corporate Supreme Court. She's worried that they will rule in favor of Hobby Lobby, just as they decided in favor of Citizens United. And that decision has been a disaster.

Case by case, this Supreme Court is, indeed, out to legalize corporate personhood. Conservative extremists have spent decades shaking their political pom poms to cheer zygote personhood. What next, hypocrisy personhood? But when it comes to actual people personhood, American citizen personhood, voting rights personhood, women's and gay rights personhood, they scurry off to Faux ChristianLand where Fox News [sic] feeds them their next "my belief system trumps reality" talking points.

And now these same zealots are (incredibly) being given credibility by the highest court in the U.S.A.

The following email from Senator Warren landed in my inbox today. As is made painfully obvious by K.C. Boyd's weekly "Upchucks" guest posts here at TPC, the separation of church and state is narrowing daily. This growing trend is serious and is endangering our dwindling democracy. We need to organize our voices and protest immediately, loudly, clearly, and constantly.

Bolding is mine:

Laffy,

Hobby Lobby doesn't want to cover its employees' birth control on company insurance plans. In fact, they're so outraged about women having access to birth control that they've taken the issue all the way to the Supreme Court.

I cannot believe that we live in a world where we would even consider letting some big corporation deny the women who work for it access to the basic medical tests, treatments or prescriptions that they need based on vague moral objections.

But here's the scary thing: With the judges we've got on the Supreme Court, Hobby Lobby might actually win.

The current Supreme Court has headed in a very scary direction.

Recently, three well-respected legal scholars examined almost 20,000 Supreme Court cases from the last 65 years. They found that the five conservative justices currently sitting on the Supreme Court are in the top 10 most pro-corporate justices in more than half a century.

And Justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts? They were number one and number two.

Take a look at the win rate of the national Chamber of Commerce cases before the Supreme Court. According to the Constitutional Accountability Center, the Chamber was winning 43% of the cases in participated in during the later years of the Burger Court, but that shifted to a 56% win-rate under the Rehnquist Court, and then a 70% win-rate with the Roberts Court.

Follow these pro-corporate trends to their logical conclusion, and pretty soon you'll have a Supreme Court that is a wholly owned subsidiary of big business.

Birth control is at risk in today's case, but we also need to worry about a lot more.

In Citizens United, the Supreme Court unleashed a wave of corporate spending to game the political system and drown the voices of middle class families.

And right now, the Supreme Court is considering McCutcheon v. FEC, a case that could mean the end of campaign contribution limits – allowing the big guys to buy even more influence in Washington.

Republicans may prefer a rigged court that gives their corporate friends and their armies of lawyers and lobbyists every advantage. But that's not the job of judges. Judges don't sit on the bench to hand out favors to their political friends.

On days like today, it matters who is sitting on the Supreme Court. It matters that we have a President who appoints fair and impartial judges to our courts, and it matters that we have a Senate who approves them.

We're in this fight because we believe that we don't run this country for corporations – we run it for people.

What oh what would we Progressives do without Bernie Sanders? In today's Los Angeles Times, he wrote an op-ed laying out in very clear detail how to make wise choices about how to fix the economy.

Sanders, thankfully, is a member of a budget panel composed of Democratic, Republican and independent Senate and House members doing what they can, supposedly, to avoid another GOP government shutdown.

Senator Sanders explains how to move forward (as opposed to the same old backward, destructive GOP ideas), and how we managed to go from healthy surpluses to (unnecessary) deficits.

He reminds us that by the end of President Clinton's presidency, we had a a $236-billion surplus, and that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted a 10-year budget surplus of $5.6 trillion, meaning we could have erased the national debt by 2011.

Too bad Republicans screwed that up.

And of course, they're blaming President Obama for the horrible outcomes of their horrible policies and horrible obstruction. Here's how it really went down:

GW Bush's Afghanistan and Iraq wars were not paid for.

Those wars cost us up to $6 trillion.

Those wars were put on our national credit card.

Bush signed Congress's costly prescription drug bill.

That costly prescription drug program was not paid for either.

Bush and Congress gave big fat tax breaks to the wealthy and big corporations.

As a result, revenue went down.

The 2008 recession, caused by the deregulation of Wall Street, also caused revenue to drop.

Big fat surpluses turned into big fat deficits.

Now gather 'round kiddies, because it's Hypocrisy Time!

Interestingly, today's "deficit hawks" in Congress — Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and other conservative Republicans — voted for those measures that drove up deficits. Now that they're worried about deficits again, they want to dismantle virtually every social program designed to protect working families, the elderly, children, the sick and the poor.

In other words, it's OK to spend trillions on a war we should never have waged in Iraq and to provide huge tax breaks for billionaires and multinational corporations.

Sanders goes on to say that austerity doesn't work, because it clearly hurts those who are already suffering.

Instead of talking about cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, we must end the absurdity of corporations not paying a nickel in federal income taxes. [...]

At a time when we now spend almost as much as the rest of the world combined on defense, we can make judicious cuts in our armed forces without compromising our military capability.

He also thinks it would be a swell idea if Congress members started, you know, listening to the American people, especially because so many polls show that we don't want cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

In fact, according to a recent National Journal poll, 81% do not want to cut Medicare at all, 76% do not want to cut Social Security at all, and 60% do not want to cut Medicaid at all. Other polls make it clear that Americans believe that the wealthiest among us and large corporations must pay their fair share in taxes.

So, Republicans (and even some Dems), how about paying more attention to us, the voters, instead of trying to grab it all for yourselves? It's not about you. It's about all of us. It's about We the People.

The American right wing is filled with people who have a visceral reaction to the changes taking place in this country. Many are angry that a black man is president, that immigrants live among them, that gays may be allowed to marry, that their gun ownership may be limited and that "elitist" liberals write laws.

Jonah Goldberg thinks it was outrageous initially to entertain the possibility that the Boston bombing was a right-wing plot. The attack occurred on Patriots' Day in a city known for its political liberalism. Ignoring the possibility of right-wing involvement would not only have been ignorant but also a disservice to national security.

Thomas Bailey

Long Beach

***

Goldberg's effort to paint the 1920s as a conservative paradise by skewering an FDR speech had the benefit of pointing me to the president's magnificent 1944 State of the Union address. It shows how thoroughly the "spirit of fascism" that prevailed in the 1920s, in the form of "unregulated free market corporatism," has returned to America.

As FDR noted, America after the Depression understood that "necessitous men are not free men."

It was this understanding that for decades gave us the greatest prosperity for the greatest number.

Now, "Reagan revolutionized" Americans seem to believe that "government-regulated, unarmed corporations are not free people." It is this understanding that has given us the current era of the greatest prosperity for the fewest number — an echo of the 1920s.

Richard S. Marken

Los Angeles

***

Goldberg makes some good points about the left's demonizing of the right, but the examples he lists pale in comparison to the red-baiting of the last 100 years. "Left wing" doesn't mean "communist." And I haven't noticed any liberals stocking up on guns and ammo.

Congressman Hank Johnson, who represents the eastern suburbs of Atlanta in the U.S. House of Representatives, talks about the "American Legislative Exchange Council," which influences state legislatures to pass pro-corporate legislation, including "Stand Your Ground" laws.